Why Public Beta Testing Is Not Always A Good Idea

Public beta testing (in other words open beta testing) nowadays plays a significant role in the process of the software development and can be considered a good supplement for the private (or closed) beta testing. Nevertheless, you should be aware about the risk involved when running open beta testing.

Four reasons why public beta testing is not always a good option for your mobile application testing.

#1. You can get the negative response from the public.

When you are going to present your mobile application to the audience for public beta testing, you think that your app will generate lots of buzz and users will be exited to get your product. But you should bear in mind, that events involving your application can be directly contrary. Public who is testing it can think that your app is not user-friendly, very complicated and buggy. Besides, it may happen that they simply will not like your application at all.

In order to avoid such issues, make sure that private beta testing stage is completed. You will be aware of the trickiest bugs and the ways of coping with them by that time and when you will represent your app to the open testing, it will be almost flawless. So that you will get positive buzz as expected.

#2. The process of open beta testing may avert your users.

This situation can happen when the user experience of your testing audience is not very successful. If users have some serious issues connected with using your application, they may think that this app is not worth their attention, time and especially money and on the launch day you will be shocked to know that no one want to buy your product.

The advice as for this situation is similar to the advice as for previous case. You should pay more attention on private beta testing since this type of beta testing will help you to become acquainted with user experience.

#3. You can get your team overloaded.

Presenting your mobile applications for open beta testing first of all means that you will receive hundreds of reoccurring bug reports and lots of requests for support in case your public beta is rather big. Depending on the size of your time and degree of your readiness, these requests can completely exhaust your team and therefore lead to the delay of the launch of your product.

Plan for both feedbacks and support beforehand and then discuss these plans with your testers. Organize feedback loop so that your testers could send their feedback without any issues and your team would know what to do with them. Use mobile app beta testing management tool to get everything well organized and to ensure efficient app beta testing process.

#4. The risk of something unexpected can happen in the process of open beta testing.

When you are going to give the opportunity to thousands of users to test your application there is always a risk that something unexpected may happen. For example, their way of using your app is completely different from the way of using your team has expected.

The best advice in this case is to start the public open testing in small groups. If you see that the process of the beta testing is successful you may gradually add more testers. It will give you the opportunity to finish the process of beta testing with minimal damage in case something goes wrong.

As you may see, public beta testing is not always the best option to start your app beta testing. To avoid unexpected situatons, negative feedback throughout the web and your prospective users’ frustration make sure to run closed beta tests before.

When your main goal is to cover all the locations and devices that your prospective users may have, try to use crowdsourced professional beta testing, that combines all the benefits of both closed and open beta testing activities.